


Lieder ohne Worte

by eponymous_rose



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Canon - TV, Drama, Gen, Music, POV Third Person, Science Fiction, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 23:06:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eponymous_rose/pseuds/eponymous_rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He and she and an abandoned music hall: a solitary performer plays for an empty audience, keeping Time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lieder ohne Worte

The concert hall is silent, and empty, and still.

It's not the sort of hush that comes between movements, when old women hastily crinkle their sweet wrappers and the tall man in the very front row coughs and clears his throat well into the first few bars, nor is it the awed stillness that ripples through an audience after a virtuoso's first cadenza.

A saturnine sort of anticipation, this, as in the moments before tuning begins, before the first strain of bow on string, scratching and catching and pulling out a tone that sings above the rest, reaching for the briefest of perfections.

The air in the aisle beside row G scratches, catches, and _pulls_.

In place of the quiet, a man is standing, stiff and uncomfortable, gaze darting back and forth across the room, shattering the stillness in its assessment, its dismissive judgement. "Sapphire," the man says, and his voice echoes back to him from the wings, louder, stronger, and, for a moment in the overwhelming darkness of the concert hall, he is the shadow.

"I'm here," says a voice, softer, with enough conviction that it becomes true; at his side, she casts the man into stark relief, all colour and grace to his awkward blankness. _Tabula rasa._ "This seems more along Ruby's line," she says, and touches the backs of the plush red seats as she moves towards the stage, fingers tracing the fabric, assessing, judging, dismissing.

"How long?" says the man, and strides alongside her, watching her hands, deft and light and lingering a moment too long.

"It hasn't happened, yet," she says, stopping at the edge of the ring of light hanging off the stage. "We'll be ready when it does." For an instant, her too-blue eyes flash to meet his. "The briefing was quite explicit this time."

"They've always-" But he stops himself, runs a hand along the dust gathered at the edge of the stage, tracing aimless patterns in silent mimicry of her own sure touch. "Yes," he says at last, and meets her eyes. _Sturm und drang._ "A bit too explicit. This is nothing but an exercise."

"I know, Steel," she says, and he doesn't soften at her reassuring tone, but his hand catches her wrist, and for an instant she seems the cold one, distant. "This is the weak point, here." She slips her hand from his grasp, follows the marks he's made in the dust. "This building is old, Steel, and the emotions here are-" She pauses, closes her eyes, and her lips move with the echoes of an ancient song.

"What is this, then?" he says, and turns away from her to the darkness of the theatre. _Lights are for the living,_ he'd said, and here the living are confined to darkness while the brilliance shines on long-dead music, tones echoing throughout the ages. "A shrine to music?"

"Something like that," she says. "For displays, for performances." Her eyes flicker open, and she smiles, and he doesn't, but they both turn as the first faint strains of a violin waver across the stage.

A man - no, a boy, awkward and gangly, with tousled hair and thin glasses perched right on the end of his nose, fades gradually into view, weaker than his echoes, slipping through a caprice with rapid, sure strokes of the bow.

The woman flinches, staggers back a step, and the man's hand rests briefly on her shoulder. "Sapphire," he says, just as the boy on the stage misses a stroke, and for an instant the melody wavers.

"I'm all right," she says, "the music's old, Steel, and he's not there."

"Not there?" Again, the rhythm slips its moorings, wavering around the sound of his voice, like ripples expanding.

"He's a memory," she says, and sways again on her feet; this time, he catches her, and his hands rest as hers had done, a moment longer than necessary, but she is cold again, distant. "The music is real enough; the boy is keeping Time, Steel, and it's breaking through the song. The song is the trigger."

_Music moves only in time._

"Take it back, Sapphire," he says, and she glances away as the boy's frantic arpeggio falters. "Take Time back."

"What good will that do?"

His voice is dull, hard, glinting as it tears through the boy's dying melody. "Take it back."

Her hand catches his as she turns away from him, looks up at the stage, and he feels the thrumming in the air as space adjusts to this latest impossibility of Time. There is a deeper sense of awareness in these not-moments, deeper and colder, like water flowing from the shore: he sees flashes of the boy playing, not in reverse but in seconds of conjoined melody, cut off only to be restarted at an earlier point, and wonders whether she sees it the same way, whether she's at all aware of the illusion she's creating.

"That's enough, Sapphire," he says, and her hand releases his; they are again standing alone in the music hall.

He moves away from her, strides up the steps and onto the stage, the brilliant spotlights casting shadows all around, indistinct. "Resonances," he says, and steps to the spot, centred in the stage lights, where the musician had been - will be.

"Resonances?" She's neither cold nor warm, now, but there is a light in her eyes. _For the living,_ he'd said, and the violin grows louder.

"It's sound," he says as an image of the boy, faint, starts to flicker around him in time with the wavering music. "Sound is the vehicle Time has chosen, and sound can be slowed, can be stopped at the right temperature. They've made music out to be so much more, but it really is only-" He stops, and the shrill vibrations of the violin redouble their volume, and for a moment his frown clears, a light behind the shadows-

"Steel!" she calls, and again, silently.

He smiles, then, a twitch of the corner of his mouth, and instead of music the air around him is crackling with cold, with an impossible chill that sinks right down into the stage. The violin is-

The violin is screaming, low and drawn-out and crushed, a tortuous wail that cuts off with a gasp, and for an instant the air hangs heavy, as at the end of a symphony, in anticipation of another note, another phrase to draw it further, another cadence to pull the song to an end.

"It's over," she says, and, with a small sigh, he collapses. "Steel?"

"Don't touch me," he says, huddled on the floor as she climbs the steps to join him on the stage.

"I won't," she says with a hint of exasperation, and pauses. "That was foolish of you to attempt without Lead. We could have found an easier way."

He laughs, an unnatural sound that echoes strangely against the brilliance of the stage. "It worked, didn't it?"

She crouches down beside him, and for a long moment they are both wrapped up in the eloquent sort of silence that is content to remain nameless. "Someday," she says at last, with a self-deprecating smile, "we will hear real music, without the ghosts and-"

"Time?" he says, and she looks away. "It's not as though we can avoid it, Sapphire, Time in music and music in Time."

"You should rest," she says, and her hand ghosts over the chill of his shoulder, not quite touching.

With a grimace, he turns away from her, slips sideways and disappears, leaving her alone on the stage, under the hot spotlights and dancing motes of dust.

She straightens, squints against the brightness of the stage lights, trying to make out the abandoned theatre against the glare. "This is Time," she says, softly, as though reciting some half-remembered poem. "This is Time, and we cannot see it, and it waits to break through-"

Life in the darkness, death in the light; she turns from the blackness and steps away from it all, leaving a silence in her wake that is neither expectant nor appreciative, but carries with it a faint growling undercurrent, an echo, a shadow of the song that came before.


End file.
